Synopsis
by Hal Erickson

The eighth and final season of Ironside finds wheelchair-bound detective Robert T. Ironside (Raymond Burr) continuing to purge San Francisco of criminals and murderers with the help of his assistants Sgt. Ed Brown (Don Galloway), policewoman Fran Belding (Elizabeth Baur) and aspiring lawyer Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) who this season not only passes his California bar exam, but also takes a wife named Diana (Joan Pringle). However, Ironside and company don't have much time to pursue justice: the season ends after a mere thirteen episodes. The show gets on the road with the two-part season opener "Raise the Devil" which features what, for Ironside, constitutes an all-star guest cast: Dane Clark, Bill Bixby and Caroline Jones. Other guest performers worth noting this year include Mike Farrell, just before M*A*S*H, in "Cross Doublecross"; former Batman stalwarts Cesar Romero and Alan Napier in The Lost Cotillion; Jim Hutton, on the eve of his stint as TV's Ellery Queen, in "The Far Side of the Fence"; and radio personality Casey Kasem as a lab tech in "Fall of an Angel". Though the final episode telecast on NBC was "The Faded Image", there were still three additional episodes in the Ironside manifest. "A Matter of Life of Death", "The Organizer" and "The Rolling Y" would not be broadcast until the series went into off-network syndication.